It's a Crime (18 page)

CHAPTER
21

F
ormer LinkAge salesman Phillip Hipkins had “dropped from sight,” according to Ellen Kloda, but there was an address Pat might try. Virginia, bunched up in the front of the Touareg, meditated on the phrasing. Had she “dropped from sight” when she left Maine? She was trying to avoid touching a carefully folded white paper bag on the floor mat. She told herself that it was just a bag, but someone else’s discards were gross, no matter how nicely folded.

Pat and Virginia drove to Wayne, less than half an hour away. The houses in the area were half stone-face and half aluminum siding, new enough to be flimsily constructed and old enough to show it. The address they sought was down a short street. A young woman with a red bandanna wound around her head sat on the front steps and smoked a cigarette.

“What luck!” cried Pat, pulling up to the curb.

When the young woman realized they were getting out of the car, she stood, started to throw away the cigarette, then changed her mind, checked on the remaining length, and took another hungry drag.

“We’re looking for Phillip Hipkins,” said Pat, her voice going through its usual high-noted curlicues.

“He’s not here.” The woman was in her twenties; the shoulder-length hair under her bandanna was thin and blond; and her face was scrappy-looking, despite its even features.

“But he does live here?” pressed Pat.

“For more than three months.” It was not a fact she was happy about.

“My husband used to work with him.”

“Oh.” The young woman relaxed, lost interest, scraped the end of the cigarette on the cement step. “He’s already down there.”

“Down where?”

“With the rest of them. Out on Forty-six.” When Pat just looked at her, she added, “Isn’t your husband at the lunch?”

“Frank is actually in jail,” said Pat, and for the first time she looked a little embarrassed.

“Jesus,” said the young woman. “And I thought my father was bad. What did he do?”

“He was one of the LinkAge accountants who, you know…”

She took this in slowly. Then she said, “I’ve got to get back to my kids.”

“We’re here about a reimbursement check,” said Pat, not showing the best judgment, if his own daughter had reservations about him.

“I really do have to get back to the kids.” The young woman eyed her front door.

“I lost everything, too,” said Virginia.

“And she’s my best friend,” said Pat.

“Oh, all right.”

Her name was Myra, and her two toddlers were sitting in front of the TV in the living room, watching a talking yellow sponge. Their attention was not diverted by the presence of two strangers. “Come into the kitchen where we can talk,” said Myra, picking her way through a scattering of guns: army green, navy blue, and battleship gray. “Boys,” she added by way of explanation.

“What a nice house!” exclaimed Pat. “I love the picture.” A framed child’s drawing of some sort of animal was the only decoration.

“So who’s your husband?” asked Myra as she moved dirty plates off the dinette set.

“Frank Foy.”

Myra shook her head. “Never heard of him. He’s one of those big bug criminals? A mastermind?” She ran an appraising eye over Pat’s leather car coat. “I thought they all got away with it.”

“Frank wasn’t big enough to get away with it,” said Pat. “If you know what I mean.”

“No,” said Myra, “I don’t.”

“He got caught up in this thing, and now he feels awful about it. So many people have suffered. I got your father’s name from Ellen Kloda. Do you know Ellen?”

“No.”

“A wonderful woman. Frank’s only true friend at the company.”

“That company destroyed my father,” said Myra. “He lost his job, his savings, his pension, his wife, and his house all in about six months. He had nowhere else to go, so he came here. He walks around like he got kicked in the stomach. My husband says I’ve got to tell him to leave, but right now I just can’t, even though it’s turned out to be a disaster.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pat.

“I don’t mind for me so much,” said Myra. “And my husband isn’t around a lot. But I mind for my kids. My father is angry all the time, and I don’t like the kids to see him like that. It riles them up. It riles everybody up.”

“I know,” said Virginia sheepishly. “I threw a glass.”

“Really?” said Pat with interest.

“The only thing that calms him down is his lunch with the Marks,” said Myra.

“That sounds nice,” said Pat. “Who, exactly?”

“The Marks,” Myra repeated. “I don’t think all of them are really named Mark. My father isn’t, obviously. But the two guys who organized it were Mark Upshaw and Mark Land, and a few of the first people they asked to join them were called Mark. Because of the double meaning. It’s sort of a joke.”

“Oh,” said Pat.

“They meet at BreeZee’s,” said Myra. “But I would be careful if I were you. They’re pretty pissed off.”

When Pat and Virginia got back into the car, it occurred to Virginia that she should ask whether they were going to go out to this lunch, but it didn’t seem to matter enough. She frowned out the side window.

Route 46 was a strip lined with franchises. Their entrances, which were as frequent as every hundred yards or so, continuously sucked in and belched out more cars. BreeZee’s was on the right side of the highway, which was handy, because there didn’t seem to be any way to get over to the left. In an SUV waiting to exit, a teenage driver had one hand on the steering wheel and the other in her mouth. She was staring wide-eyed—and biting her nails.

“I guess there’ll be a lot of guys like Hipkins here,” said Pat.

“I guess so.”

“I think I’m nervous,” said Pat. “But I know I’m going to survive, and that’s what matters, right? Right, Virginia?”

Virginia did not answer. What was Pat talking about survival for? It was maddening.

The parking lot was huge, broken up by baffling concrete markers, and painted with irrationally placed arrows and lines. They were evidently supposed to regulate traffic flow but it was hard to tell exactly how. BreeZee’s was marooned in the middle: a pink stucco façade that turned a blind eye to the world. Thick tabletops, high-backed banquettes, and oversize menus suggested that it would be the ample portions, not the taste, that would justify the inflated prices.

A couple of long tables had been pushed together by the far wall, and three men sat together amid the picked-over disorder of maybe a dozen completed meals. Pat strode on back, the flaps of her leather coat stiff and her matching taffy-colored clutch firmly placed under one arm. “I can’t believe I caught you!” she said.

Two of the men looked up with puzzled annoyance. The third, the one whose curly gray hair had missed its last couple of cuts, said, grinning, “Sit down. Tell us what you’re selling, and we’ll each take two.” He was wound as tight as a watch.

Pat did take a chair, a couple of seats away from him. Virginia remained standing, reluctant to inconvenience the waiters and aware of a keener disturbance in the air, some kind of crawling nervousness.

“I’m looking for Phillip Hipkins,” said Pat.

“Now why would a woman like you be looking for Phil Hipkins?” The flirtatiousness was heavy-handed, hard to listen to.

“Hipkins? Which one was he?” The other two men consulted each other.

“It’s complicated,” said Pat. “I’m Frank Foy’s wife.”

“The lowly accountant who corrupted an entire Fortune 500 company? How interesting.” This was from the flirt. His tone had soured.

Pat laughed. She could always talk. She just sailed right through. She didn’t have to understand what was going on in a room. “He’s awfully sorry. Is your name Mark?”

The man shook his head. “Ted. This is Mark Upshaw.” He pointed to the skinny fellow. “And Mark Land.” He indicated the light-skinned black.

“We were all rich once,” said Upshaw. “Hard as it is to believe. We would come in to work and check the stock price. Then we’d check it again at lunch.”

“It was never real for me,” said Ted. “It was real for other people, I could tell. But it was never real for me.”

“I’ve got to go…,” said Land, turning to leave.

Ted drew a breath. “I could feel the end,” he said. “But no one knew exactly how it was going to go down.” Everyone was listening to him. The Marks, Virginia, even the waiters. “Enron had already disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a puff of smoke. At LinkAge we all thought, Jesus, the smoke over there used to be a billion-dollar company. I don’t mind giving a nice spin to some facts. I’m a salesman, that’s my job. But it’s tough when you don’t have any idea what the facts are. The bonuses that year were really chintzy. Word came down that lunches were going to have to come in at under twenty dollars. In Manhattan! Can you believe it? They were cutting costs right out of our wallets. And you could read on the Yahoo! message board what kind of Christmas the top brass had. They got millions and millions of dollars’ worth of bonuses.”

Like Frank’s,
thought Virginia.
For the garden.

“It was a real challenge,” said Ted. “After the arrests we expected to go bankrupt at any minute. Toward the end we’d go out for a few hours at lunch, just as if we were Riley Gibbs and his cronies, and we’d take a friend or two and get really shit-faced. But we’d always get the chits upstairs by the end of the day. We’d parcel them out in different ways. One guy actually wrote in the space for customer or contact ‘George W. Bush.’ The girls downstairs knew what we were doing and tried to push the expenses through right away so we wouldn’t get stuck with them. Everyone started putting stuff in their briefcases. You know, the stuff that accumulates over the years like photos and mugs, but also pens, paper, enough to equip a dozen Shakespeares.”

“Oh,” said Pat. Virginia thought she was going to jump out of her skin.

“You remember Neil Culp’s retirement party?”

“Sure,” said Pat.

“I don’t mean I
went,
” said Ted. “I wasn’t
invited.
But everyone knew all about it. It’s not like they tried to keep it a secret so no one’s feelings would get hurt. Just the opposite.”

“It was really boring.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Ted. “But Johnny Spaulding did go, and somehow he got hold of all these big cutouts of Culp.”

“There were these huge photos scattered around at the party,” Pat explained to Virginia.

“They weren’t just photos,” Ted argued. “They were freestanding cardboard cutouts, about three-quarters size.”

“The High Risk boys started dancing with one of them really late,” said Pat. “The band was gone by then, though, so it looked pretty dumb.”

“There was a band?” asked Mark Land.

“Yeah,” said Pat. “It wasn’t very good.”

“After the arrests,” said Ted, “the cutouts started appearing all over the building. If you went up to the cafeteria for coffee in the morning, there he’d be, Neil Culp, with a mouth balloon saying, ‘Let them eat cake.’ Or you’d go to the men’s room and Culp would be saying, ‘You’ll find the accounts in the third stall from the left.’ That kind of thing. Eventually someone from upstairs would show up, but meanwhile everyone would have seen it. And who knows, management might not have even minded, figuring Culp was taking some of the heat off them.”

Two waiters started to ostentatiously remove glasses and silverware. Ted began to talk faster. “I was going up the elevator one night to pick up my wallet—I’d forgotten it earlier—when I ran into Johnny Spaulding with a big suit bag. One of the cutout’s feet was kind of sticking out, so I said, ‘Don’t forget your shoe there.’ Don’t forget your shoe! It was great. We were the only ones in the building, because no one was working late by then. Spaulding didn’t care if I knew.

“You may not believe it, but I cheered when the stock price fell under five dollars. And I wasn’t the only one. You could hear the cheers all over the building. It was a relief after all those months. We hated that company so much we didn’t care what happened to us.”

Then, without warning, Ted jumped up and bolted out the door.

“My goodness,” said Pat.

“What do you expect?” said Mark Upshaw, his hostility unmasked. “When people get hit hard, either they punch back, or they turn on themselves. You’re lucky he didn’t wring your pretty neck.”

“Pat—” said Virginia.

“What did you want to see Phil Hipkins about?” said Mark Land quickly.

“I just heard he had some problems.”

“I guess,” said Upshaw. “But at least he didn’t have a total meltdown, like Ted.”

“We can’t all be Johnny Spauldings,” said Land. “Spaulding’s incredible. He lost bundles on LinkAge, but he’s made a lot of it back in wind farms. I saw him on TV just the other day talking about renewable energy. He’s put together his own farm with over a hundred turbines. Returns can top twenty percent. That’s where I’d put my money if I had a nickel.”

“I’m glad there are still some happy endings,” said Pat.

“Yeah,” said Upshaw. “Wind farms are an incredible tax dodge.”

“Really,” said Pat.

CHAPTER
22

D
esperation in today’s thrillers is often expressed through shopping. It is supposed to be every reader’s fantasy. A threat will force a regular person into frantic extravagance. He or she must spend more and more money until finally delivering a package across the street costs four thousand dollars cash. A character fleeing a bad guy will purchase plane ticket after wig after used car after listening device after digital camera after arctic boots.
Your Honor, I did buy an entirely new wardrobe on this credit card I found. But I had to—to save my life.

Pat and Virginia were in the first-class section of an airplane on a runway in Newark. Pat had bought the tickets as soon as they’d returned from BreeZee’s, just like that, online. Whether this was a sign of desperation, Virginia did not know. The impulsive extravagance was similar. Pat was going to turn around this problem with her husband if it killed her. Her smile was as bright as a hubcap.

“What do you think,” she said. “Do we have enough magazines?” She was not asking a question; she was relishing their sheer plenty. She had a thick stack, with as many springtime flowers as celebrities on the covers. (Or at least Virginia assumed they were celebrities; she didn’t recognize any of them.)

“It’s too bad we’re not on an international flight,” Pat continued. “You could have gotten a bottle of Scotch at one of the duty-free shops. You wouldn’t believe the deal Frank got on some twenty-four-year-old Macallan last year.”

“Yeah?”

“It was only two hundred dollars, or maybe it was half off two hundred; I forget exactly.”

The two women were on their way to Oswego County in upstate New York, where they had reservations for a suite in a picturesque old hotel. Tomorrow Johnny Spaulding was going to show them a prospective wind farm site near Lake Ontario. Pat had postponed her search for Phil Hipkins and made the appointment with Spaulding in order to invest some money for LinkAge’s victims. “It’s the ideal solution,” she said.

Virginia had no idea if it would work. Certainly if anyone could pull it off, it was Pat. She thought back to the Marks and idly wondered what Ted had done to distinguish himself among his unhappy lunch crowd. Refuse to leave his bed? Have visions? Drink vodka for breakfast? None of it sounded like much, put so baldly. Yet somehow he had separated himself out. Everyone had suffered, but it was Ted who’d had a “meltdown,” like an ice-cream cone in the heat. Maybe this counted as a “nervous breakdown,” a term that had a quaint appeal. Virginia wondered what she could do to qualify; she seemed to be stuck putting one foot in front of the other forever.

“Look!” cried Pat. “That’s a good sign. Basket of gold.” The curled-up left side of the gardening magazine was trying to unfurl as she excitedly tapped a (very short) fingernail against a photo of a dozen dense yellow floral mounds whose shape echoed the light-colored rocks they were interspersed with.

“Basket of gold,” said Virginia, unexpectedly tickled. “Basket of
gold.
How about planting it in the Culp garden?”

“I can think of all sorts of plants for that one,” said Pat. “How about Japanese blood grass? Love-lies-bleeding. Bleeding hearts. All sorts of satisfyingly bloody names.”

The engine began its airy roar.

Virginia hadn’t been on a plane in years. The Christmas after her father died, she and her stepmother flew to Costa Rica and stayed in a hut that was part of a resort. Everything about the flight emphasized the suspension of your life. All airports were alike, as were all airplane seats, all airplane hues, all overhead luggage compartments, all seat-back trays, all window glass, all asphalt, all signalers with their futuristic jumpsuits and their arcane hand gestures. She’d been prepared by television for the long, apparently intermingling lines of would-be passengers snaking back from conveyor belts, and for having to take off her shoes while her carry-on was being X-rayed. This simply meant that the process was longer, the interruption of her life more insistent. The tacky uniformity remained.

In one book, a mystery masquerading as science fiction, future humans snatch people from planes about to crash and bring them forward to their own time, leaving behind simulated body parts in their place. Virginia wondered about that moment when you think you’re going to die and instead you’re propelled into the future. It would probably be hard to tell the difference between death and time travel. Your mind would likely disintegrate no matter what strides had been made by then in understanding how the brain worked.

“Thank God for Will,” murmured Pat. “He’s the one who made this trip possible.”

Ruby had been pleased when Pat had announced their departure. “I guess we’ll find something to do,” she’d said in a put-upon voice that wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old. It fooled Pat, of course, or maybe she was simply used to it. Ruby could have flaunted that secretive smile with impunity for years. Pat might have even got a kick out of it.

Pat did enjoy so very many things. Her taste, in truth, was a bit slack. She was not as discriminating as Virginia and so probably did not appreciate how superior Will was to any other young person who might have happened by. There was great charm in his aloofness, his vulnerability, his slight shiftiness. Although he may already have been cruel—or suffered cruelty—he was still fresh. You had to guess at his past as well as his future.

“I like Will,” said Virginia. “But do you think he’s the right chaperone for a thirteen-year-old girl?”

“Why not?” said Pat, lifting her brows. She extracted some lip balm from her purse, which was silk-screened with the face of a glamorous forties blonde and the words “If I Have One Life to Live, Let Me Live It as a Lie.”

“Do you really have enough money to invest in wind farms?” asked Virginia.

“Sure,” said Pat, offering her the lip balm.

“For a while I thought Ellen might be trying to ruin you.”

“Ellen?” crowed Pat. “Wait till you see her. But I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you.” When Pat had asked her why she hadn’t cashed the check, Ellen had said she didn’t deserve it. Apparently she felt guilty about sending out the memo with the real figures. Pat tried to reassure her. No one blamed her, not even Frank. But finally Ellen confessed that she hadn’t sent out the memo by accident. She’d done it on purpose. “It was just after 9/11, when everyone wanted to go out and save the world. She thought it was the right thing to do. She didn’t know it would destroy everyone’s savings.”

Virginia laughed. “So she set out to destroy the company.”

“I think it would have happened anyway. Eventually.”

“Still…,” said Virginia.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

Virginia leaned back against the headrest, her brain sated.

“It’s not something I would tell Frank, of course,” said Pat.

“How incredible, to think of what one person can do,” said Virginia.

“You’re looking a lot better than you did up in Maine,” said Pat.

Virginia’s thoughts jumped briefly to the man in New Zealand who kept faking his own death. His name was Milton Harris. You could see him in a lot of different ways. The crude view would be that he kept pretending to die so that his insurance would pay off and that the pretense eventually caught up with him and he really did die. But what if his goal was not money. Surely there were less risky ways of making it, even illegally. What if he was getting what he wanted every time he played at death? What if he longed for that middle land, that death-in-life and life-in-death? Maybe there was nothing wrong with reaching out and touching death. Maybe you were supposed to wonder how it tasted.

For the first time, though, Virginia felt that she was on the outside, rather than the inside, of this question. No matter how insistently it demanded an answer, no matter how entangled she might be, no matter how dire her situation, she was distinguishable from the question itself.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” she said.

There was a silence.

“I never said you would!” cried Pat.

But Virginia peeked and saw that
Pat Guiney
(or rather
Foy
) had turned red.

“I probably wouldn’t have even if you hadn’t whisked me away from Maine,” said Virginia.

“Oh,” said Pat. She dropped the magazine, but strapped in side by side as they were, all she could do was grab Virginia’s shoulder. “I knew you were thinking of it!” she said fervently. “And thank God you didn’t go through with it! What would I have done?”

“I don’t know,” said Virginia. “But I liked being whisked.”

Pat became voluble. “Johnny Spaulding is a great-looking guy,” she said. “He was in the Hart Ridge paper when he lost his money in LinkAge. Not that I saw the picture back then, but it’s online now. And there was a more recent picture of him in front of a row of wind machines. They’re so weird, you wouldn’t believe it, not at all like in
Foreign Correspondent.
They have blades like scissors.”

“Some would call it poetic justice if he swindled you out of all of your money,” said Virginia.

“No, no,” cried Pat, upsetting what was left of her wine in her enthusiasm. “Don’t you see? Johnny Spaulding changed the whole character of what happened. He’s going to do well for himself, for his investors, and for the environment. We have to help him and do right by ourselves as well. Besides, I think you should marry him.”

That was really what she said.

Because the plane was small (and had not been snatched by time travelers), it stopped in the middle of an expanse of asphalt rather than at a gate. They were going to be the first people off the plane. Pat started poking at her cellphone. “Five messages,” she said to Virginia brightly. “I wonder how many that is per minute.”

Overhead compartments sprung open as the passengers twisted underneath them, groping upward. Virginia hoisted her Estée Lauder tote bag to her shoulder.

“What?” Pat’s startled sob was terrible to hear, and everywhere eyes turned toward her with alarm. She fell heavily into her seat and burst into tears. “It’s Ruby,” she said. “She’s in trouble. She’s at the police station.”

“Ruby?” said Virginia, shaking her head in disbelief. “But what happened to Will?”